Synergistic Selection

How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind

"Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy." Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species. It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, "life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go." Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. "Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver." As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. "One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy."

Contents:

• Explaining Complexity
• A New View of Evolution
• How Cooperation Trumps Competition
• Evolution as a "Combination of Labor"
• A Tale of Two Theories
• The Major Transitions in Evolution
• The Self-Made Man I: Australopithecine Entrepreneurs
• The Self-Made Man II: From erectus to Homo sapiens
• The Rise of Complex Societies
• The Next Major Transition

Readership: Undergraduate, graduate students and the general public interested in general science, general life sciences, evolutionary biology, human biology/anthropology/primatology, and public policy.
Key Features:

• It is an in-depth treatment of a still little-known Darwinian theory of complexity in living systems that is focused on the causal role of synergy in evolution
• The book also highlights the important causal role of behavior in evolution, and it offers a new theory about human evolution called the Self-Made Man Scenario